This cloud-like, futuristic material has been sneaking its way into your life since 1931

Despite
its cloud-like appearance, aerogel is a strong solid that feels
like hard styrofoam in your hand.NASA/JPL-Caltech

Aerogel is about as perfect a contradiction as you could imagine.

It holds the record as the lightest solid ever created, yet is
durable enough to support the weight of a car or survive the
vacuum of space.

Because of these seemingly magical qualities, researchers have
woven the material into capacitors, lasers, spacecraft, and
nuclear weapons.

Aerogel hasn't languished inside laboratories, though. You can
find it inside modern carpets, cosmetics, paints, pipes,
wetsuits, and roofs, just to
name just a few products. And today inventors are creating
new recipes and manufacturing techniques for aerogel, leading to
novel applications that include
thin yet incredibly warm (and stylish) jackets and oil
spill-cleanup kits.

Without Samuel Stephens Kistler's fortuitous discovery of aerogel
in the early 1900s, however, we might still be dreaming about the
existence of this incredible, cloud-like substance.

Here's what aerogel is, where it came from, and how it's
increasingly working its way into everyday life.

A strong yet brittle solid

People often describe aerogel as feeling like Styrofoam or that
flaky, green foam that serves as potting for fake plants. That's
because of aerogel's internal sponge-like structure; the material
is so dehydrated that it's about 99% air.

Scientists have created recipes for more than a dozen different
types of aerogel, but they all share a similar process: mix
chemicals together, let them settle into a wet gel, and then suck
all of the liquid out. (You can make aerogel yourself if
you're patient, determined, and have about about $1,000 sitting around.)

It's actually a pretty complex process and material, so it helps
to think of aerogel as similar
to Jell-O.

The gelatin powder in Jell-O forms a flexible, liquid solution
when mixed with warm water. As it cools, the liquid solution sets
into shape by forming a stiff, tangled
network. Under a powerful microscope it looks like an unruly
ball of yarn. But if you heated up the set Jell-O, it would dry
out and you'd be left with a lump of Jell-O powder once again.

Chemists most often make it from from silica — the
most abundant mineral in Earth's crust. Unlike the process of
simply leaving Jell-O to set, however, they cycle wet aerogel
through multiple phases of cooling and heating under pressure,
which retains the silica network's shape even after completely
drying out.

A serendipitous discovery

The details surrounding Kistler's discovery of this incredible
material are disappointingly murky. In
fact, no one knows exactly when or where the revelation
happened. We also don't know if Kistler coined the term "aerogel"
or pillaged the name from someone else. (It's even hard to find a
good photo of Kistler.)

Still, most historians agree the magical moment happened at some
point between 1929 and 1930, when Kistler taught undergraduate
courses at College of the Pacific in Stockton, California. The
apocryphal tale goes that he and colleague Charles Learned were
in a friendly competition: to see who could replace the liquid in
a jar of jam with a gas, but leave the structure and shape of the
jam in tact. (Every teacher's favorite after-class game.)

Kistler won the bet, and ended up discovering aerogel as
a fortuitous bonus. He went on to publish his
first study about aerogels in the journal Nature in 1931,
then patented the method
of producing aerogel on Sept. 21, 1937.

In the early 1940s, Kistler signed a contract with Monsanto
Company — today an agricultural
company known for developing and selling genetically modified
plants.

A Monsanto plant in Massachusetts manufactured the first
silica-based aerogel products under the trade names Santocel, Santocel-C,
Santocel-54, and Santocel-Z. Their first application:
a lightweight thickening agent for paints, makeup, and
napalm. Aerogel even made its way into cigarette filters and
freezer insulation.

Significant and unusual applications for Santocel, outside the
flatting and insulation fields, were developed for civilian and
military use. Among these were the Department of Agriculture's
approval of Santocel as a thickening agent for screwworm salves
for sheep, and its use as a thickening agent in the jelly of the
fiery Napalm bomb. Santocel also has become an essential
ingredient in the manufacture of silicone rubber.

But Monsanto reportedly discontinued the line in 1970. It was
expensive to manufacture, and competition from other, newer, and
well-marketed products pushed aerogel to the bottom of their
business priorities.

Kistler died in 1975 — just a few years before his supermaterial
really took off. In the late 1970s, researchers in France
developed a novel method of producing aerogel in just a few hours
instead of weeks. Then, in the early 1980s, scientists in Germany
realized its potential use in particle physics applications,
according to
aerogel.org.

This would pave the way for Aerogel's bright future.

To space and beyond

As Kistler neared retirement, he self-published a collection of
writings on non-scientific topics called "Memorabilia."

In one excerpt from
1955, he wrote, "We are finite beings in the midst of an infinite
universe ... as far as we can perceive, space is limitless in all
directions ... the farther we probe into the structure of matter
... the more we discover that in generations to come will have
bearing upon the everyday activities of people."

His musings on space turned out to be apt, because in the late
90s, NASA scientists fashioned silica-based aerogel onto a
massive, tennis-racket-shaped collector that sat outside its
Stardust spacecraft to collect pristine pieces of the infant
solar system.

It was the perfect choice because the material's tangled
structure acted as microscopic baseball gloves to capture
fast-moving comet particles without damaging them. It's relative
transparency also helped scientists back on Earth easily find and
extract the comet dust for analysis.

Today, the world is taking advantage of its many properties for
use in modern-day products. It lines the walls of
buildings in the form of insulation. Clothing companies use
it to create super light-weight and warm ski
jackets. It's even inside some tennis rackets.

Researchers are also looking to the energy-absorbing properties
of silica aerogels for novel uses, such as shock-absorbers in
cars, cradling aircraft flight data recorders, and protecting
fragile electronics such as laptop computer hard drives. They're
even testing cellulose-based aerogels for cleaning up oil spills, and are
mixing up new types of aerogels that are stronger and more
resilient than the silica aerogels of days past.

Then there are polymer-based aerogels, which are essentially made
from plastics and make excellent insulators for refrigerators and
clothing. They're more robust than the flaky silica-based
aerogels, yet just as light.

Mary Ann Meador, a senior research scientist at NASA's
Glenn Research Center, told Tech Insider that the only
challenge now is manufacturing aerogels at a higher scale and
lower cost, which she hopes will happen within the next one or
two years.

"We’ve demonstrated a lot of properties of these materials and
they're useful now, but we can only make things on a pilot scale
or less," Meador told Tech Insider. "As more products come
online, I think that they have the potential to revolutionize the
field."